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Plus another TNR boner

By Mark Kilmer Posted in Liberals — Comments (4) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

In The Plank, the disgraced blog of the humiliated The New Republic, I found a bit by someone called Michael Currie Schaffer. He compares the President's Thursday speech to Britney Spears's evidently disastrous appearance on some awards show using quotes, a quote about Britney next to one about Bush. (The quotes concerning the President Currie Schaffer are from the New York Times, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Andrew Sullivan, Chris Matthews, and Sylvestre Reyes – rabid anti-Bushies all.)

The final quote dealing with President Bush is from the preter-silly Todd Purdum of the gnarly style magazine Vanity Fair:

From deep in the fortified precincts of the White House, the president projects a preternatural calm. He gives orders to nonexistent armies, which his remaining lieutenants gamely transmit.

We've all read stories of Hitler demanding this division to attacking the Russians in this part of Berlin, that in that part, which divisions did not exist and had long since not existed. His remaining adjutants – Keitel, Jodl, Krebs, Burgdorf… -- knew better but humored the weakened but still evil madman.

But let's be fair to Purdum. He was here hijacked by Currie Schaffer and driven out of context, as is the insatiable wont of the folks at TNR.

Read On…

I am unable to find the Purdum Vanity Fair piece on the magazine's web site – though there is a nifty bit about Stephen Glass, the center of TNR's 1998 editorial/journalistic betrayal of trust. That being said, I was able to find some information about the article -- October issue, "Inside Bush's Bunker" (page 334, article runs from 332 to 335 and 390-395) – from a lefty blog called The Common Ills:

Now, with not quite a year and a half left before Bush leaves office, we have already arrived at the beleaguered endgame of his presidency. From deep inside the fortified precints of the White House, the president projects a preternatural calm. He gives orders to nonexistent armies, which his remaining lieutenants gamely transmit: "Reform immigration!" "Overhaul the tax codes!" "Privatize Social Security!"

I've highlighted the bit which Currie-Schaffer lifted for the TNR blog. You know, despite what Currie-Schaffer asserted, the quote is not about the President's speech last Thursday. Are we all stunned that a TNR staffer has again ignored honesty, the truth, reality?

Currie-Schaffer gives the appearance of a mad Bush who, like Hitler, was shrieking orders regarding the war in Iraq, believing he could win which reality said he couldn't. Nope. Purdum had the President telling his aids to reform taxes, immigration, and social security.

But make no mistake, the former New York Times "journalist" Purdum was trying to make the equation with Hitler. He continued:

Outside the bunker, in the country that his administration now refers to as "the homeland," there is chaos and confusion. The Democrats bridged the Ptomac after winning the elections last fall, and the Blue Army has now overrun most of political Washington. Its flag flies above the Capitol. More and more of the president's subordinates have been captured and interrogated, most notabley the attorney general, Alberto Gonzales. Others, such as Matthew Dowd, the president's former chief campaign strategist, have managed to make good their escape -- Dowd by parachuting onto the front page of the enemy New York Times with a detailed denuciation of Bush's policies. Indepenent powers that would sue for peace -- the Baker-Hamilton Commission, for example -- have been banished. Some loyalists, including presidential counselor Dan Bartlett, have simply fled to the safety of the private sector. For one reason or another, most of the commander in chief's senior advisers are now gone, replaced by callow upstarts and last-chance opportunists. The two most powerful advisers have been the president's second-in-command and his propaganda minister -- his vice president and his political strategist -- who had been at his side from the beginning and have remained close and trusted, despite the catastrophes they helped to engineer. Dick Cheney will haunt the bunker till the end, but the political strategist, Karl Rove, has quietly slipped away. The leader himself -- with his lady and his loyal dog -- soldiers on, in an atmosphere of disconnection and illusion. Lurid tabloid tales may hint at binge drinking and marital estrangement, although visitors report uniformly, and much to their surprise, that the president seems optimistic, unbowed, chipper, his gaze bright and steadfast. The tide is about to turn! We will prevail! But it is a hermetic and solidarity existence.

Wow. Purdum's argument is so wildly flawed as to render it absurd beyond the realm of creativity. His bile has backed up to his brain, forcing him to take uncontrolled leaps of fancy, reaching for parallels to break his fall. His poisoned brain tells him that he's done it, but instead, he falls to his rhetorical death.

The last, great hope of those who want to see the spineless, clueless Democrats – absent sense and goals – to take the White House and reign for 1,000 Years was failure in Iraq. Now that it seems that America won't let this happen, we start to see Bush Derangement Syndrome in its later stages.

What a mess.